In his new post to his site Zeev Suraski talks about the momentum growing behind PHP 7 and some of the recent articles about companies making the move and the overall impression of the new version.

We’re now a few months since PHP 7 came out, and if you’ve been following what’s going on in the PHP world, things are looking pretty exciting! [...] First, InfoWorld gave PHP 7 the 2016 Technology of the Year Award, which is quite remarkable. Remarkable is also how InfoWorld chose to describe the performance gains that are promised by PHP 7 – and I absolutely agree.

[...] As more and more people are trying PHP 7 out, we’re seeing more and more evidence that the promise of 2x performance is being realized, big time. Most recently, Badoo published an article detailing their experience migrating for PHP 5.6 to 7.0

He gets into a bit more detail about the numbers that Badoo published and gives a quick "thank you" to Dmitry Stogov for helping to spearhead the effort to get PHP 7 out the door from Zend. Finally, he points out that there's a Zend Server version that already runs on PHP 7 if you'd like to try it out.

InfoWorld has put together a review of some of the top PHP frameworks out there and have shared their results in terms of capability, ease of development, documentation and ease of installation (and overall score, of course).

You can arm yourself with one of the PHP-based Web development frameworks covered in this article. In the following pages, I'll look closely at the Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, and Symfony. I'll also give quick overviews of Qcodo, Lithium, Seagull, and Yii. All are open source frameworks, and all implement to one degree or another the MVC (model view controller) architecture pattern. In addition, all purport to help you build a more scalable and more easily maintainable Web application than you could otherwise create from scratch and, most importantly, do so in less time.

The introduce each of the frameworks at a pretty high level and start with their "Test Center Scorecard" showing their overall ratings of each of the four they tested. They link to a few other articles that talk more about the features of each in-depth and give an "at a glance look" as well. The list shows the minimum PHP version required, licensing, level of documentation currently provided and some of the general pros and cons.

According to this new post on the Zend Developer Zone, the Zend Framework has won itself a BOSSie award (from InfoWorld) in the "best open source application development software" category. Matthew Weier O'Phinney has this to say about the award:

I am one of the privileged few to have worked with Zend Framework since before the original public pre-alpha release. [...] What [Mike Naberenzy] showed me at the time captured my imagination: the company with the best known name in the PHP industry was building an application framework, and the code I was seeing was simple, straight-forward PHP. It was the first time I'd seen a framework I was actually interested in using -- even if it was in its early, early infancy. I knew at that moment that I wanted to be involved in the project.

He mentions some of the things that "shook up" the development world when those first versions of the Zend Framework came out - like the PHP5 requirement and the CLA you had to sign to contribute.

Other BOSSie award winners include jQuery, Apache Hadoop, Git and Go.

InfoWorld recently posted a review from their "Test Center" that looks at the latest version of Acquia's Drupal (v1.0).

As we've seen time and again, in an increasing number of enterprise software categories, open source has become a promising alternative to commercial software. But there's no free ride. Support from developers is often problematic, and you need to find products with a large enough following so that programmers have an incentive to build add-on modules. [...] Yet if you take support out of the equation, Drupal emerges as the better solution for many enterprise Web projects.

They point out some of the good (the power and flexibility of the CMS) versus some of the bad (the need for developers/admins with specific knowledge of the system) with a heavier lean towards the good. Other "goodies" they include are the robust installer, pre-integrated modules, like the Content Construction Kit and Mollom, and the ticket system built into the application for help with CMS-related issues (from Acquia).